Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume

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Immanuel Kant famously said that he was awoken from his "dogmatic slumbers," and led to question the possibility of metaphysics, by David Hume's doubts about causation. Because of this, many philosophers have viewed Hume's influence on Kant as limited to metaphysics. More recently, some philosophers have questioned whether even Kant's metaphysics w

Paul Guyer is professor of philosophy and the Florence R. C. Murray Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of eight previous books on Kant, he is also general coeditor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.

"In detail, and with great clarity and fairness, Guyer compares [Kant's and Hume's] respective treatments of scepticism, of the major concepts of causation, objects, and the self, of practical philosophy and of the philosophy of taste. Guyer shows that the match is by no means as one-sided as the usual view maintains."--Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education "Guyer is noted for his Kant scholarship ... The present book, whose subtitle best expresses its content, is a collection of five previously published essays, somewhat reworked, which range over themes that occupied both Kant and Hume. This is done with magisterial competence."--M.A. Bertman, Choice "Guyer's book provides a masterful reconstruction of the systematic ambition of Kant's critical philosophy and of the third Critique in particular. In addition, he underlines the essential openness and modesty of the Kantian system that is due to Kant's unwavering insistence on the limits of the human powers of cognition--a point that was not heeded by his immediate successors and is often only poorly understood even today."--Peter Gilgen, Monatshefte